Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Neurobiology of Language Conference (NLC) 2009

I think the conference was a huge success. The meeting had over 300 registrants -- so many that an overflow room with an AV feed was required during the sessions. The meeting attracted a diverse group of scientists ranging those with linguistically oriented approaches to traditional neuropsychology, functional imaging, animal neurophysiology, and genetics. The speakers were a diverse group and included both senior scientists and post docs. I have to say this now appears to be THE conference for us neuroscience of language folks. Congratulations and thank yous to Steve Small and his group (particularly Pacale Tremblay) for organizing the meeting!

At a business meeting of interested scientists (a nice range of personalities: Tom Bever, Luciano Fadiga, Yosef Grodzinsky, Richard Wise, Alec Marantz, Gabriele Miceli, David Poeppel, Greg Hickok, Steve Small and more) it was decided that the conference should become an annual event, for now tied to the SfN meeting as a satellite, which means it will be in San Diego next year. There was discussion of possibly alternating N. America-Europe (and perhaps Asia & S. America) meeting sites in the future.

So mark you calendars for next year in San Diego. Any ideas for debate topics?

4 comments:

I am a trauma specialist and licensed marriage and family therapist. I am seeking research on the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on language, speech, or Broca's area of the brain. Please email me with any authoritative research on the topic. I firmly believe that PTSD prevents language interact under stress.

Just wanted to say that i totally agree - it was a great meeting, and I'm happy that such a conference now exists. The calendar is marked, and we Europeans (which we only call ourselves in the US) would certainly be grateful if the conference came our way sometime in the future.

(Oh and Greg, the speakers were even more diverse: they also included at least one PhD student...)

Here's an idea for a debate topic: Has the new wave of overt speech production studies with fMRI revealed anything we didn't already know about the neural substrate for language production, in healthy folks or people with language impairment?

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Greg Hickok is Professor of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine, Editor-in-Chief of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and author of The Myth of Mirror Neurons. DavidPoeppel, after several years as Professor of Linguistics and Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, is now Professor of Psychology at NYU. Hickok and Poeppel first crossed paths in 1991 at MIT in the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience where Hickok was a post doc, and Poeppel a grad student. Meeting up again a few years later at a Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting in San Francisco, they began a collaboration aimed at developing an integrated model of the functional anatomy of language. Research in both the Hickok and Poeppel labs is supported by NIDCD.